


Rambling Recipes Of A Hopeless Romantic

by BlackWiresOnHerHead



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 07:58:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17117477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackWiresOnHerHead/pseuds/BlackWiresOnHerHead
Summary: Listen. This year’s been a rough one on all of us. But the good news is, it’s the holidays! Stress baking and eating your feelings is completely acceptable. EXPECTED, even. So, good citizens of Hell’s Kitchen: throw on that apron. Grab your sugar-butter-flour. You favorite KIND OF VERY TIPSY local baker Foggy Nelson is here to help you get through the most wonderful time of the year.BUT ANYWAY. Here’s our first recipe to kick things off. It’s snickerdoodles! Plain and simple, but a universally acknowledged crowd-pleaser. Guaranteed to win the affection of anybody within ten feet of them. Even the mysterious, insanely charming stranger with Lennon-esque glasses who walks by your place of employment every morning? Well, who knows. Crazier things have happened.





	1. Snickerdoodles Softer Than The Ugly Sweater You Pretend To Hate

Listen. This year’s been a rough one on all of us. But the good news is, it’s the holidays! Stress baking and eating your feelings is completely acceptable. EXPECTED, even. So, good citizens of Hell’s Kitchen: throw on that apron. Grab your sugar-butter-flour. You favorite KIND OF VERY TIPSY local baker Foggy Nelson is here to help you get through the most wonderful time of the year with my annual charity fundraiser! 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this shindig: For every $500 pledged to charities through our Indiegogo campaign, I’ll be posting another top-secret family recipe for all the internet to enjoy, assuming my great-great-grandmother doesn’t literally come back from the grave and try to haunt you for holding the knowledge of our family cookbook. Just sprinkle a little ring of salt around you, it’ll all turn out fine, I promise. 

BUT ANYWAY. Here’s our first recipe to kick things off. It’s snickerdoodles! Plain and simple, but a universally acknowledged crowd-pleaser. Guaranteed to win the affection of anybody within ten feet of them. Even the mysterious, insanely charming stranger with Lennon-esque glasses who walks by your place of employment every morning? Well, who knows. Crazier things have happened. 

  1. Take 2 sticks (1 cup) of butter and 2 large eggs out of the fridge. You’re gonna want them closer to room temperature for this, which means waiting around half an hour. What do you do with your 30 minutes? Well definitely don’t spend it pretending not to look through the window just to make sure you don’t miss the sight of that really hot dude walking by in his suit in the morning. That would be pretty pathetic.
  2. Or, y’know. You could also get a bowl and combine 2 & ¾ cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and ¼ teaspoon of salt. That’s another option.
  3. When your butter has reached soft and squishy perfection, get another bowl and mix together your butter and eggs with 1 & ½ cups of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.
  4. Blend the dry ingredients into the butter mixture. But not all at once! Add a little at a time while you blend it together. Hold it back a little. You gotta play it cool, ya know? Shouldn’t be too eager about it. That would be weird.
  5. Put your dough in the fridge to chill for about 15 minutes. Take your baking sheets and put them in the fridge too. For these truly exceptional cookies you’ll need both the sheets and the cookie dough to be cool. Super cool. The coolest they’ve ever been in their life.
  6. Stop trying to figure out how to make your bakery’s store space more friendly and accessible to blind people and other people with disabilities and turn on your oven to 350°F.
  7. Mix 3 tablespoons of sugar and 3 teaspoons of cinnamon in a small bowl, and then roll 1 inch balls of dough in the cinnamon sugar. Get it alllllll over those guys.
  8. Place each one of those glorious churro-flavored globs of cookie dough on the chilled, UNGREASED cookie sheets about 3 inches apart, and pop ‘em in the oven.
  9. Spend 10 minutes worrying about the most audibly pleasing playlist possible for people who might have to rely on their sense of hearing more than the average person. And then the cookies are done!
  10. If you prefer your ‘doodles soft and chewy, remove them from the pan immediately and place them on wire racks to cool. But let’s face it: I don’t know you or your life or your baked good preferences, so if the life you live involves just a little bit of crunch, let the cookies sit on the baking sheet for another minute or two before moving them to racks.



Friends, I just wanna say how much I appreciate that you’ve read this far. I hope you are out there appreciating my appreciation. And also appreciating my drunken recipe writing. But if you’d like to show even MORE appreciation, don’t forget to stop by this year’s Indiegogo page and get us, as a society, closer to the reveal of yet another Nelson family recipe. If it goes anything like last year’s fundraiser, you’ll be hearing from me again in just a couple of weeks. 

Now go get festive like a motherfucker and live your best life this holiday season!


	2. New York Cheesecake Approved By A New York Native

Friends, I like to consider myself an honest man, and therefore I am about to be honest with you: Sober Foggy woke up the morning after posting that snickerdoodle recipe and was utterly _mortified_. Impressed by the overall typing accuracy, sure, but mortified nonetheless. Because the trouble with Drunk Foggy is 1) he’s very articulate, and 2) he’s an extreme over-sharer. That guy has no problem at all laying out his entire thought process basically verbatim for anyone who happens to be around to see it.

However.

The feedback on that recipe was admittedly pretty hilarious. And the numbers certainly don’t lie. The amount of shares that post ended up getting was incredible. Website traffic has picked up pretty significantly. Plus, you all have managed to raise enough money to unlock the next recipe in just under a week! That’s _half_ the time it took compared to last year’s fundraiser. 

So what’s a guy supposed to do when his embarrassment seems to be helping a good cause? Take one for the team, obviously. Maybe someday my dignity will come back to life and I’ll have a chance to beg its forgiveness.

So, Hell’s Kitchen inhabitants and everyone else following this series… here we go again! Just less inebriated this time.

I’ve been feeling kind of nostalgic lately. Got to talking to someone recently and found out he actually grew up really close by to me. And I mean, like, _really_ close. “Within two blocks of me” close. It’s such a small world, huh? You’d think any two boys born and raised in the same Midtown neighborhood would have _definitely_ known each other, but… somehow we didn’t. Until now. Maybe in some other lifetime or alternate universe or whatever we were actually best friends since birth. Who knows.

All this is a very long-winded way of saying: I was thinking about my childhood. Childhood included cheesecake. And now I will be sharing that cheesecake with you.

To start off, you’re gonna have to prep the pan.

  1. Wrap a 9- or 10-inch springform pan with one large piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil. (And when I say heavy-duty, I mean it!) Make sure you’re covering the underside and extending all the way to the top so there are no seams on the bottom or sides of the pan.
  2. Repeat with another sheet of foil. You know, just as insurance. We’re trying to set up a solid foundation for this, right? Gotta lay out all the groundwork. Look out for Future You in case you get nervous or distracted and accidentally do something you didn’t really mean to do. Like, say, comment how attractive you think a person is during your first actual conversation with them. God, what a nightmare.
  3. Spray the inside of the pan with nonstick cooking spray. Gotta put your best foot forward for the presentation of the final product. It’s always a damn shame when you put so much work into something only to fuck it up right when it becomes important, right? So we’re gonna do our best to AVOID that. In the future.



Uh, anyway. Now, the crust!

  1. Preheat the oven to a toasty 375°F. Wherever you’re baking, it’s sure to add to the overall coziness, especially compared to the crazy winter weather we’ve got this year. Make people feel welcome when they decide to come in and stay a while.
  2. Take 12 graham crackers and break them down into crumbs. It ought to give you somewhere between 1 and 1 & ½ cups of crumbs. And honestly? Crushing those suckers to dust is kind of relaxing sometimes. Gives you an outlet for any nervousness you might be having. Like if you were to, I don’t know… have a sudden realization that you were talking to someone you used to hear about and sort of idolize as a kid, maybe? Just suddenly, all at once, put two and two together and figure out extremely late in the game that you’ve been talking to somebody who was—is—super important and impressive.
  3. Melt 5 tablespoons of unsalted butter like getting an unexpected laugh from someone who rarely even smiles all the way melts your fragile, unsuspecting heart.
  4. Combine the crumbs and melted butter with 2 tablespoons of sugar and ⅛ teaspoon of salt in a medium bowl. Stir until they’re so well combined that you can’t think of any conceivable reason the ingredients were never together before this point in time.
  5. Press the crumbs into an even layer on the the bottom of the prepared pan. You can definitely smooth over any bumps you encounter if you give it enough time and attention.
  6. Bake the crust for 10 minutes, until it’s set into a nice, solid foundation for the rest of this glorious cheesecake. Remove the pan from the oven and set aside.



And now to the fun part: the filling!

  1. Reduce the oven temperature to 325°F. Also, get a kettle of water boiling in the background. We won’t need it quite yet, so a slow burn is perfectly fine for now.
  2. In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat 32 ounces cream cheese, 2 cups of sugar, and 3 tablespoons of flour together. Use the paddle attachment on medium speed—y’know, not at like a snail’s pace, but definitely don’t jump the gun either—until just smooth, about 1 minute. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to be sure the mixture is evenly combined.
  3. Now we ARE gonna slow things down a little. A change of pace keeps people’s attention, right? As long as you’re not shitty about it, at least. And besides, what’s more attractive than showing that you respect boundaries? Um. But yeah, you’re gonna add 4 teaspoons of vanilla, 1 packed teaspoon of lemon zest, 2 teaspoons of fresh lemon juice, and ¼ teaspoon of salt, and beat on your mixer’s low speed until everything is just combined.
  4. Maintaining the slow, not-overeager pace of the mixer, add 6 eggs, one at a time. But continue scraping the sides of the bowl while you do, because neglecting the stuff you already have just because some new stuff is getting thrown into the mix is kind of a shitty thing to do. And it makes your batter inconsistent and sort of upsetting.
  5. Then mix in ½ cup of sour cream. Make sure the batter is uniform, but do not over-mix. “But Foggy, how do we know if we’ve done too much?” you might be asking. Well, friend, even I unfortunately do not have that answer. We’re _all_ trying our best to figure that out.



Okay guys, gals, and non-binary pals. Here comes the tricky stuff. The actual BAKING.

  1. Check to make sure your oven has cooled to 325°F, then set the crust-containing cheesecake pan in a large _roasting_ pan. Pour the cheesecake batter on top of the crust, and then carefully place the whole pan setup onto the middle rack of the oven.
  2. Your water ought to be piping hot and boiling now, so pour it into the large roasting pan until the water level is about 1 inch high on the cake pan.
  3. Bake your cheesecake for about 1 hour & 30 minutes to 1 hour & 45 minutes, until the cake is set. It’s important to know that a set cheesecake does NOT look liquidy! It just wobbles a little when the pan is nudged. Like the feeling you get in your stomach when you see one of your favorite people walk through the door. Y’know? Is that a universal feeling?
  4. CAREFULLY remove the entire pan setup from the oven and place it on a wire rack. Keep the cheesecake pan in the water bath for about 45 minutes, until the water is just warm. You could do a lot with those 45 minutes. Go looking through old yearbooks. Look up some news stories you remember hearing about as a kid. See what Google can tell you about some people you may or may not remember from school. Indulge in some childhood nostalgia, all that jazz.
  5. But when you eventually come back to the present day, remove the springform pan from the water bath and discard the foil. To avoid getting cracks in your cheesecake as it cools, run a thin-bladed knife around the edge of the cake to make sure it's not sticking to the sides. Because who likes a clingy cheesecake? Nobody.
  6. Then cover the pan with plastic wrap and place the cheesecake in the fridge to cool for at least 8 hours. Overnight totally works too. Holy hell, could you imagine somebody surprising you with freshly baked cheesecake first thing in the morning? I’d just about die.
  7. And finally, when you’re serving it to all the people you’re hoping to dazzle with your sublime baking skills, remove the sides of the springform pan. If you want to give it a little extra flavor to really knock it out of the park, you could top it with a berry sauce of your choice.



Thus concludes another captivating rewrite of a Nelson family recipe. Somewhere, my ancestors are rolling over in their graves and plotting my gruesome murder in order to stop the publication of more of our secrets. But that will be MY problem and not yours, dear readers! If you enjoyed this recipe or simply wish to accelerate the Nelson-specific zombie apocalypse, go ahead and visit our Indiegogo page to donate. You all basically crushed it in terms of generosity last week—and once again, thank you so much to everyone who's donated so far this year—so let’s see if we can keep this momentum going! See you all again at the next $500 milestone!

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally the single most self-indulgent thing I have ever done. I saw that “fic as the novel-length prologue of an online recipe” idea and instantly, desperately wanted it with every particle of my existence. And finally I got fed up waiting to read it and decided to make it myself!
> 
> Say hi on [tumblr](http://blackwiresgrowonherhead.tumblr.com/) if you dare approach the hellsite.
> 
> Recipes:
> 
>   * [Snickerdoodles](https://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/soft-snickerdoodle-cookies-97496?mode=us)
>   * [New York cheesecake](https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/new-york-style-cheesecake.html)
> 



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